Ellis Island, a Las Vegas casino, once closed its craps tables on weekend nights, but after a guest complained about the policy in an online review, Ellis Island re-evaluated the situation and decided to keep the tables open until at least midnight.

The casino hosted a Yelp town hall for small-business owners to discuss best practices when it comes to dealing with online reviews.

The Las Vegas town hall is the third in a nationwide series Yelp launched to help small-business owners be proactive about their online reputations.

Ellis Island garners 4,000 views a month on Yelp, said Michael Galatte, the company’s social media specialist. The casino is one of thousands of Las Vegas businesses inspiring online conversations. Some reviews are effusive; others drip with vitriol.

If business owners opt out of the conversation, it carries on without them. Some 85 percent of consumers use Yelp to find local businesses.

"The worst thing you can do is be super defensive,"
said Misti Yang, who manages the Las Vegas community for Yelp.

"The best you can do is say, ‘Thank you.’ "

New businesses like The Birthday Suit, a waxing spa that opened in 2011, and Paint and Party, which launched early 2012, have embraced social media sites, deal-of-the-day offers and other online marketing avenues as a means of getting their names in front of potential customers.

"This is probably the best time to open a business, because there’s no way we could have afforded the advertising," Paint and Party owner Donna Friese said.

Other business owners at the town hall weren’t so sure the time needed to keep up appearances online is worth it.

"I don’t know if I want to be on the Internet every five minutes," Stake Out Bar and Grill owner Bill Devlin said.

Devlin has a website and Facebook account for his Buffalo Bills team bar on the corner of Tropicana Avenue and Maryland Parkway. He has in the past offered a Groupon deal, but would rather cultivate customers in the neighborhood face to face.

Maybe Devlin is onto something.

A solid online reputation "starts in the offline world with great customer service."

Darnell Holloway, Yelp’s manager of local business outreach

Article courtesy Caitlin McGarry, the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

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Jennifer Young (owner), John, and Jeremy presenting the trophy at the cafe.

The trophy, which we featured on our website in the early days after launch, was only available to businesses that signed up during our launch period.

We offered this trophy to our customers for sharing our vision of creating an awesome service and customer-oriented business by being one of the first TalkToTheManager customers and maintaining their account for 12 consecutive months. This one-year anniversary has arrived for many of our customers, so they’ll receive this beautiful trophy to display at their business.

We’ll be sending these out to numerous customers, so if your anniversary is coming up, be looking for yours to be delivered!

Serendipity Cafe and Lounge is a great place to get great food, get some work done (free wi-fi) or enjoy a cocktail (the new adjoining lounge that recently opened is a great place to meet with friends).  For the cafe patrons, there is a play area for kids in the back where mom and dad can have a nice breakfast while keeping an eye on the youngsters.  Try the Serendipity Breakfast. It’s hearty!

We spend so much time creating comment cards, and coming up with survey questions so that we can better understand what our customers want. Try googling “comment card templates” and see how many hundreds of websites pop up promising to help you create the most effective questions. But what do we really learn from customers answering our questions? Well… we get the answers to our questions, but that’s not what customer feedback is all about.

Let’s take a step back and talk about why we want customer feedback. It’s simple really, they are the reason we are in business, so we want to make sure we are meeting their expectations. So why are we asking them questions that we think will make us better? We ask questions like, “How would you rate the quality of the food? On a scale of 1-5 how was your service?” Sure, these questions give us metrics to measure and help us find areas that need improving. But what really matters is customer perception. Each customer has a different experience and therefore has a different ‘top-of-mind’ thought, or impression, when it comes to your business…

And impressions are everything.

These are the things that your customer is going to tell their friends. They are the things that come to mind when someone asks for a recommendation of where to eat, and where to stay when they are visiting. These are the things we need to know. What do customers think of when they think of our business? In other words, we shouldn’t be asking customers pre-scripted questions but instead should be letting them start the conversation. When we let them start the conversation we get a much deeper understanding of how they view our business. 

When customers are able to tell us their initial impressions of our business we begin to see trends. We start to hear over and over the same ‘top-of-mind’ themes, both positive and negative. This is where we can begin to make improvements. We can amplify the positive; really drill down and become experts on the things our customers have come to know us for, and perhaps use these things in our marketing efforts. We can solve the negative; train our staff to watch for these issues, and give them tools to correct problems before they happen.

Our customers talk about our businesses in the most random of conversations. I’ll give you a couple of personal examples.

The other day a friend was reminiscing about when he was young and how he grew up drinking out of mason jars. This immediately brought to mind a bar I had recently checked out for the first time that served all of their drinks in mason jars. Do you think they have a question on their comment card or survey that asks you about your opinion of a mason jar? I highly doubt it. But regardless it was the whole reason I told him about this bar. And now they have a new and excited patron who can’t wait to check the place out.

Or how about this one? A friend of mine was posting pictures on her Facebook of cool crafts she’d learned to make out of old, empty liquor bottles. Again, I was immediately reminded of a really cool restaurant that brings out your water in old whiskey bottles. I posted this as a comment on her pictures and spurred a whole conversation about this particular restaurant. Their comment card? Well I checked it out and it certainly didn’t ask anything about your opinion of how your water was served.

So what?!? How does this type of feedback help your company at all? Let’s think about how customers make decisions. They make them based on emotions. In both cases above conversations were started that led to new customers, customers who will most likely talk about your business to their friends, and not because of any of the metrics you are measuring. They are talking about you because of some small little thing you did that evoked an emotion. Do you measure the emotions evoked in your customers in your survey? Does that 1-5 scale truly capture the experience they had?

What would your customers say about you?

If you stripped away the comment card, and took down your survey, do you know what your customers would say? Do you know the trends that would emerge? Do you understand what you give to your customer that’s much deeper than the product/service you provide them? Do you know what emotion you evoke? Did you make their life easier? Or perhaps put a smile on their face? Did you give them an experience worth sharing with their friends?

This is customer feedback. Don’t ask your customers to waste their time answering your pre-scripted questions. Sure those things can help, but if you simply ask them to start a conversation with you, and give them a convenient way to do so, you’ll likely be quite surprised at how much you can learn about the experiences your customers are having.

So put the comment cards away for a minute, set down the metrics report, and try giving your customers a direct line to share their thoughts with you. It’s time to listen.

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The top 3 types of businesses reviewed:

1. shopping
2. restaurants
3. home & local services

Ages of Yelp users are pretty much uniform, with the 25-34 age group having a slightly higher slice.

Click image for full-size.

I talk to business owners on the regular, and if there is one word that always sparks a conversation, it’s Yelp. There is a lot of controversy swirling around this company that originally launched in July of 2004. Many businesses have seen negative effects of the now ever so popular ‘everyone’s a critic.’ And with good reason, Yelp boasts that in January alone they received 100 million unique visitors to their site. Wow, that’s a hard number to fathom.

The fact of the matter is with 100 million visitors per month, and that number constantly growing, there is absolutely no escaping the clutches of the online review giant. Face it; people love writing, reading, and sharing reviews. Ever since the worldwide acceptance of the internet, along with advances in mobile, we’ve been on information overload, which has quickly turned us into ‘infoaddicts.’ What do you do when you have a question, you usually google it. Heck, now I don’t even type it in my phone, I just ask Siri.

But the point is this… no matter how many falling stars you wish on, birthday candles you blow out, and shiny, red shoes you click together, online reviews are not going away, so maybe you should learn to love them. After all, they can be very advantageous. If you know something can ‘make or break’ your business, shouldn’t you do everything you can to be on the ‘make’ side?!?

Here are 3 reasons you should claim your Yelp business profile. Kudos if you already have. If you have, think of these as 3 reasons to direct happy customers to leave you a nice review. And remember, it’s free.

1. $8,000

The Boston Consulting Group recently surveyed 4,800 business owners to get a better understand of how Yelp is impacting them economically. They reported that small businesses that have claimed their free Yelp accounts made $8,000 a year in revenue stemming directly from Yelp. Obviously this is an average, which means some were up and some were down, but this is still a very large number, and definitely a trend worth paying more attention to.

2. 9% Conversion

A study conducted in 2011 by Michael Luca of Harvard Business School reported that “[A] one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9% increase in revenue…[and] this effect is driven by independent restaurants.” Think about that…9%? If your business made $1,000 a day, 7 days a week, 9% additional conversion would be $630. That’s like adding another 2/3 of a day to your week, without the additional overhead costs.

3. 19% More Sell Outs

Another even more recent study by two UC Berkeley professors found that “An extra half-star rating causes restaurants to sell out 19 percentage points more frequently (increase from 30% to 49% of the time), and up to 27 percentage points more frequently when alternate information is more scarce (e.g., Yelp is the only source of information about the business).” Wow, all that from a half a star? I think this means it’s time to point your happy customers toward Yelp.

Like I said before, many businesses have been deeply hurt by Yelp and therefore have a bad taste in their mouth. But if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. It’s free to claim your Yelp business profile and you can even respond directly to reviewers on there. So instead of pulling out the rest of your hair, start using this tool to your advantage, because it’s not going away any time soon.

When your customer asks, “What’s good here?” the server replies, “Everything.”

After the food arrives, the server asks, “How’s everything?”

All of the above are clichés that customers hear over and over again. Those expressions reduce the chances that any meaningful, relationship-building conversation will take place between your servers and their guests, and that can be bad for your business.

When servers initiate personalized, intelligent conversation, many powerful things start to happen. Brains become engaged, meaningful dialogue starts to happen, servers connect with their guests, and guests have a better time and feel appreciated and cared for.

How does that affect your business? Satisfied guests usually tip better, and they’re inclined to come back to your restaurant more often.

Use your pre-shift meetings to discuss ways your servers can improve their interactions with your guests. Discuss antidotes to typical server sayings, such as:

“Hi, my name is…”

Truth is most people don’t care what the server’s name is. Try a greeting such as, “Hi, welcome to The Crab House. I’m so glad you decided to join us tonight.” This puts the focus where it should be, on the guest rather than on the server. Have your staff practice their table greetings with a bright smile and direct eye contact, and you’ll be miles ahead of most of your competition.

“What’s good here?”

Coach your staff to describe two or three popular items that you do really well or better yet, have them recommend what they like.

“How’s everything?”

After the food is served, have your servers practice specific, intelligent questions that pertain to what your guests have ordered. “Is your tuna cooked the way you like it?” “Does anyone need more barbecue sauce?” “Have you tasted the lobster bisque yet?”

When there is meaningful conversation, human connections are made and guests feel valued and appreciated. Added bonus: they’ll want to know their server’s name so they can ask for them on their next visit!

Want to stake out a competitive advantage? Start by creating the most welcoming, sociable and conversational service staff around.

(Source: National Restaurant Association)

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Yelp announced a new revenue estimator this week. The hope? That Yelp can now actually show you how much money they are generating for your business. Is it an exact science? No, but it’s closer than anything that has existed before. Now it’s no secret that Yelp has an impact on your business, but the big surprise…the average amount of revenue Yelp generates a small business – $8,000.

So what exactly is it and how does it work?

Let’s start from the beginning. Yelp lets consumers write reviews about local businesses, which means they create a profile for each business. It is free as a business owner to claim your businesses Yelp profile. Through this profile, Yelp is able to collect all kinds of data. How many customers visited your profile page, how many called your business directly from their app, how many customers checked-in or bought a ‘check-in offer,’ etc., etc. Yelp uses these types of data to generate what it calls ‘leads.’ Then, using a recent study by The Boston Consulting Group outlining the average estimated spend per customer in your particular business category they can calculate a revenue estimate.

By multiplying the leads by the estimated spend they are able to calculate how much revenue has been generated for your business directly from their service. And no you don’t have to use their average estimated customer spend, you can fill this in yourself with what you already know is your average check price.

Sounds pretty easy, right? Think again. In order for this to be successful, they need to be able to pull data from millions of sources, so it definitely doesn’t hurt that they are now boasting 100 million unique visitors to their website every single month.

When I first posted the original article I read (from TechCrunch) on Twitter, the first response I received was “finally @Yelp’s getting it!”. That’s a great statement. They’ve built a great product that has been gobbled up by consumers, but businesses have been left bruised, beaten, and feeling neglected along the way because they haven’t had time to understand it. Well it looks like Yelp is putting businesses in the foreground now (and they should, after all they are a B2B company) and are starting to provide tools to help business owners understand the power they have the ability to harness.

Don’t get me wrong, Yelp has built plenty of tools for business owners before, such as the ability to respond publicly and privately to consumers, but at the end of the day their failure came from lack of teaching business owners how to do this. Plus it’s one more thing on the already overloaded daily to-do list. Instead, they just called them and tried to sell advertising. This doesn’t make you very happy as a business owner. But I’ll tell you what does make you happy, along with this report of the revenue estimator has come the average revenue generated from advertising on Yelp. And if you thought $8,000 sounded great, how about an average revenue generated from advertising of $23,000? With an average yearly spend of $4,200. That was enough to make me Yelp! I’ll let you do the math.

But nowadays, after the fact is too late. With so many choices available to consumers, customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed, so you really should be worrying about customer retention. And the last thing you want to do is provide a less than expected customer experience. Go ahead, hand that not-perfectly-satisfied customer a comment card, or ask them to take your online survey. Just don’t be surprised when you’re left with a blank slate, because there are much BIGGER places to vent, and customers know it.

Now that consumers know they have a voice, they look for as many channels as possible to share it, yell it, and shout it to the masses. Remember the old “have a good experience tell 1 friend, have a bad experience tell 10 friends” word of mouth mantra? Well with online review sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, you can throw that old mantra out the window. Now it’s more like, have a good experience, you’re lucky if they come back for a second, a great experience will maybe get you a 4 star review (if you hope, pray, and sacrifice for these daily), and a less than perfect experience? Well, let’s just say you probably shouldn’t expect anyone in that customers’ giant (and growing) social circle to be giving you a try anytime soon.

Let’s lay it out…

Where’s the first place you go for information? Most likely Google, or maybe your iPhone (and that’s if you didn’t go straight to your social circle). Either way, both of these are heading straight to online review sites to give you what they think are the best and most relevant choices. And if people in your social circle have left reviews, you better believe those are given priority. Hmmm, where else are consumers getting their information? How about Twitter and Facebook, where ‘friends and followers’ not only have a decision-making, and decision-changing affect on their social groups, but there is an ability to share those thoughts and feelings and ultimately begin ‘anti-(insert name of your business here) movements.’

But before you pull all of your hair out and start planning which bridge to jump off, remember that there is still good inside of people. Remember that your friends and family want to help you, remember that you have loyal customers and that they genuinely want to be a part of what you’re doing. Remember that underneath all of that stress, there is genuine love for what you do, and that always shines through. What you need to do is harness the power within that group.

This means that situations need to be resolved in real-time. And the good feedback received needs to be shared in as many public ‘social’ outlets as possible. For every 1 bad experience it will take 5 positive experiences to win that customer back. So make sure when you receive customer testimonials that you’re sharing them on as many social sites as your business is connected to. People tell you things they love about your business everyday, make sure you’re asking them to share those thoughts with their friends, family, and social circles. If the simplest way to get people to retweet your messages is to ask them to ‘please RT’, then the simplest way to get customers to share their experiences as your business is to ask them to.

With so much going on today we sometimes fail to focus on the simple things, and it’s the simple things that have been proven to work since the beginning of time. Your customers have a voice. Ask them to use it.

Educate your staff

This is the absolute number one biggest difference maker! When your staff understands that feedback (good or constructive) increases how well the business operates, and ultimately improves everyone’s situation (including theirs… i.e. more customers, more customer loyalty, larger tips, more room for growth and promotion, etc.). It’s also really great for them to know that over 75% of the messages from customers are positive. This is a really great way for them to stand out and get recognition when they’re doing a great job. And also a great way they can help contribute to the success and growth of the business.

Signage, signage, signage!

It’s hard for us to tell you exactly where to put your signs, because every business is set up differently. However we know from talking to many of you, that the businesses seeing the most success have found the most appropriate places to put their signage to make sure their customers are aware that the option to text them anonymously exists. These range from table tents, stickers on menus, sugar caddies, bathroom walls, circled on the bottom of receipts, printed on hotel room key cards, printed on brochures and marketing materials, hanging under the TV in a sports bar, and even some that have posted their TalkToTheManager phone number on their Facebook pages.

Positive feedback is important too

Don’t just ask for negative feedback. Many customers like feeling like they’re contributing to the business. This includes asking them what they love about your business. Maybe you have a special that many folks would love to see on the menu full time. This is also the number one way to get your business more positive reviews. When people tell you how great of a job you’ve done, the best and simplest answer is to thank them and ask them to write you a review on the site that’s most appropriate for your business (i.e. Yelp, TripAdvisor, Angie’s List, Urbanspoon, etc.). Don’t forget you can share the positive text messages on your Twitter and Facebook. It’s all set up for you inside of our dashboard. Click on the “Messages” tab, scroll down to the customer text you want to share, and click on the Twitter and Facebook button. Yes, it’s really that simple. Your customers are generating your posts for you now, and you get to choose the best ones to share.

Now get out there and be awesome!

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Now before I get too far into this let me state one thing…online reviews are awesome. We are all addicted to immediate information and there is no better way to feed that addiction than to read about other consumers’ interactions with products, places, and services that we’re considering using. Don’t believe me? Leave your smart phone at home for a day and then tell me you weren’t jonesing to Google something.

That being said, from a businesses point of view reviews can be terrifying. We’re going to skip right over all of the possible fraud involved (there is a TON) and save that for another blog post. Let’s talk about real reviews and how they can hurt. We’ve ALL had poor experiences at different businesses. We’ve all bought a product or two that were ‘lemons.’ Unfortunately, these things don’t always represent the business at its normal operating level. We’ve all had bad days and we know how they can affect us at work.

Now, the ultimate idea of online reviews is that reoccurring themes will surface over time. This is definitely true, but we haven’t reached that perfect pinnacle peak of society where every business is getting enough reviews for that to come true. A lot of us read reviews, only a few of us are writing them. And if your business has 8 reviews, and a couple of them are 1 or 2 stars, things aren’t looking good for you, especially as purchase decisions are being more and more driven by mobile.

Here’s a fun fact, the difference in 1 star in that 5 star rating system can be as much as 9% conversion never walking in your door. How does that feel? You just spent hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on advertising and now almost 10% of the people who WERE GOING TO BUY from you are now never going to even come in because a few people voiced their frustration on that ever-expanding internet thing. And it’s only going to get worse.

So what’s the remedy? A text a day. Your customers are already using their phones, we all know this. So why not give them a chance to use those phones to connect directly to you? Well first off, we don’t necessarily want to be giving our personal phone numbers out to everyone on Earth. Understood. But there’s got to be some way to remedy this problem.

(Entrepreneurs enter stage left)

TalkToTheManager has created a way for you and your customers to connect using text messaging that keeps both you and your customers phone numbers private. So now they can be honest with you, and you can solve their problems before they leave and write that nasty review. Just solving one customer’s issue with you can be worth a lot more than that one person coming back to your business. It can be worth 9%. Now let’s throw some buzzwords in there like analytics and operational trends. Now you can drill down and figure out where those problems are occurring – pretty rad.

Why not go for the win-win? Your customers get their expectations met, you get loyal customers, all because of a text message.

A text a day keeps the bad reviews away.
Find out more about how TalkToTheManager works.

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